On August 2, 1827, M. Ador went up to Bertet’s chamber to sign the customs registers. He sat down and affixed a first signature. Just as he was about to set down the second, Bertet fired upon him. The workmen rushed to the sound, forced the locked door, and threw themselves upon the comptroller to wrest the weapon from his hands. Ador was still breathing; all care turned toward him. It was then, while the men strove to succour Ador, that Bertet took his own life with another weapon. In that room, the outrage broke in upon an ordinary scene of labor, laying bare documents prepared long before.
The chemical manufactory of Vaugirard was the property of Messrs. Ador and Bonnaire. The customs administration had stationed two officers there to oversee the decomposition of duty-free salt. Bertet had discharged this duty for some three years. Champagnac depicts him as a troublesome, morose, and solitary figure; the proprietors had lodged complaints against him with the director of customs and petitioned for his removal, to no avail.
That morning, Ador had arrived around seven o’clock. He was preparing to go, as was his custom, to his father’s house in Issy. In the yard, he spoke cheerfully with the foreman and several laborers. Bertet came forward and requested his signature upon the registers. Ador consented without hesitation and followed him up to the chamber where the books were kept. He sat down to sign. A gunshot struck him in the back; the ball passed clean through his body.
The detonation and the cries brought the workmen running from the courtyard. They found the door bolted, as Bertet was accustomed to fasten it behind him, and were compelled to batter it in. A workman entered first, beholding Ador struggling with his assailant, who still kept his pistol leveled at him. Striking Bertet across the arm, the workman dashed the weapon to the floor and threw him down. Other men hurried to the wounded master. Seeking to open the window to give him air, they found it had been nailed shut beforehand.
The onlookers still harbored hope of saving Ador. Bertet, stretched out upon the floor, observed the commotion with no outward emotion. A laborer devoted to his master reproached him with taking the bread from their mouths. Bertet answered coldly that it was their misfortune. When warned that justice would overtake and avenge them, he declared he had no fear of it. These words, set down by Champagnac, lent the scene a peculiar hardness: the victim yet drew breath, the hands bustled about him, and he who had struck him down showed no concern for what was to follow.
A few moments later, a second shot rang out. Bertet had seized upon the confusion to drag himself to the foot of a sideboard and draw forth another firearm. He had taken his own life. At that very instant, Ador drew his last breath. The police commissioner and a quartermaster of the gendarmerie soon arrived; a search was ordered throughout the chamber and the cupboard.
There were discovered four other pistols, all loaded, together with a musket, powder, and ball. The magistrates also seized a bundle of papers. Thirty-two sheets, neatly arranged upon a shelf, were addressed to the procureur général, numbered, and initialed. Their titles—“my last reflections,” “my dying sighs”—lent them the air of a meticulously ordered dossier. In them Bertet related that he had believed himself poisoned several years earlier, describing the remedies he claimed to have taken ever since. He maintained that he remained in full possession of his senses, his mind untroubled by exaltation.
In other pages, he wrote that he required four victims, naming two masters of the works, a woman dwelling upon the premises, and a former domestic. He observed that, should he manage to strike down but one person, he committed the rest to the justice of Heaven. Certain leaves recorded an abatement of his pains and a postponement of his vengeance; others foretold the return of his agonies and the renewal of his designs. The reader encounters these ruminations not as an authentic explanation of his acts, but as declarations recorded by Bertet himself before the deed.
He had likewise drawn up the description of a funerary monument he intended to have erected for one of his victims, as well as the ordering of his own burial train. He imagined the persons he had designated bearing his pall, only to be cast into his grave after him had they survived. These schemes impart a sinister prescience to the papers, yet offer no proof that he had ever assailed each of the designated persons. On August 2, the stroke fell upon Ador; the other targets of his written rancor are nowhere recorded as having suffered injury that day.
A final document rested upon the packet, bearing the date of that very morning and addressed to the procureur général. A counterpart of his will was likewise found beneath the armpits of Bertet’s corpse. Therein he affirmed that his hour had struck and that he would drag at least one of his victims into the tomb beside him. The presence of these instruments, methodically drafted and marshaled upon a shelf, evinced a premeditation in the soliloquies he addressed to himself; yet it afforded no intelligible motive regarding the individuals he had singled out.
Champagnac observes that Bertet had practiced outward devotions with uncommon zeal. He would prostrate himself in church, mutter prayers, and had plastered his walls with holy images. The contrast between these pious exercises and the outrage moved the chronicler to speak of a derangement of the faculties and of “monomania.” These were the psychiatric notions of an essayist writing in 1833, not a modern diagnosis that can be received as settled fact. Bertet’s writings insist he believed himself poisoned; no evidence survives to show that he ever was.
On the morrow of the murder, the barber who shaved Bertet appeared before the commissioner, relating a conversation concerning the sheer violence of slitting a man’s throat while shaving him. The chapter cites these words as an instance of retrospective alarm; it does not turn them into proof that any other crime had been perpetrated or prepared. It remains the uneasy recollection of a witness who, after Bertet’s death and the fall of Ador, read a darker meaning into words dropped a few days prior.
There persisted, moreover, a singular contradiction in Bertet’s immediate fortunes. By the testimony of his papers, he had repeatedly laid plans against the proprietors and others. Yet his salary had just been raised by four hundred francs, to take effect on the first of August. He had even called upon the director of customs to return thanks—though the chronicle does not date this visit with precision. In his writings, he claimed he had gone thither with intent to kill him, but had abandoned the design upon encountering several persons. This retrospective narrative issued from Bertet alone; the recent advancement in his pay accords poorly with the simple portrait of an employee acting out of grievance against his condition.
The narrative concludes upon the seized documents and the interpretations Champagnac sought to draw from them. It records neither a trial of any survivor nor any judicial finding pronounced after the demise of Bertet, who died by his own hand in that chamber. Ador succumbed to his wound. The papers had promised four victims and a protracted revenge, yet the known event at the factory claimed but one: the proprietor drawn into the trap under pretext of signing the books. Between the marks of meticulous preparation and the absence of any reasonable cause, the chronicle leaves the riddle unread; it shows only the workmen discovering, behind a barred door, the culmination of a scheme whose written record had lain secret until the end.